Edwin Drood

Some thoughts on Drood, following on from the discussion in class.

Endings. Steven Connor has written persuasively on the way notions of ending, of false-endings, concealed endings and permeate the text. What is interesting for our purposes is the way the ‘ending’, half-way through the text, intersects the ‘life’ of the novel and leaves us with only a ghostly, spirit-text as conclusion. This in turn devolves upon two questions: how would Dickens have finished Edwin Drood, had he lived? How did Dickens finish Edwin Drood, being dead?

The former is the more respectable question, and has exercised critics ever since 1870. One interesting aspect of it is the way it elides into a specific ethical question that has to do with authorship. Dickens told Forster his intentions – that Jasper had murdered Edwin, and ‘at the close’ would ‘review’ the crime ‘as if, not he the culprit, but some other man’ were the criminal.

The last chapters were to be written in the condemned cell, to which the wickedness, all elaborately elicited from him as if told of another, had brought him. [Forster, 365]

It has been suggested that this was a blind, a tale told to throw the dust in Forster’s eyes whilst Dickens planned some utterly other ending. Whether this seems plausible or not will depend upon the individual reader, although one factor that has always struck me is that this premise, recorded in Forster, is actually a very good one – why would Dickens waste such an ingenious conception as a mere beard? In effect, it postulates a man haunted by his crime, and presumably by his impending death, as Fagin is at the end of Oliver Twist, except that the ‘crime’ was committed by a different Jasper than the Jasper who reviews its circumstances. The device facilitating this is the opium, but he effect is to imagine a character haunted by himself at the novel’s end.

The question as to whether we believe Forster’s report was initially couched as a moral judgement upon Dickens’s character. Kate Perugini, Dickens’s daughter, wrote endorsing Forster’s account, in the Pall Mall Magazine 1906:

He told his plot to Mr Forster, as he had been accustomed to tell his plots for years past; and those who knew him must feel it impossible to believe that in this, the last year of his life, he should suddenly become underhand, and we might say treacherous, to his old friend, by inventing for his private edification a plot that he had no intention of carrying into execution. This is incredible [282].

‘Treachery’ – as if to suggest that Dickens would lead a double life, in howsoever small a way, aligns him with the underhandedness of his creation, Jasper. Luke Fields reported that Dickens told him that he must draw in a long neck-tie for the illustrations of Jasper because ‘it is necessary, for Jasper strangles Edwin Drood with it’. Subsequently, in a letter to the Times Literary Supplement in 1905, he insisted that doubting this story would be to deny ‘the nobility of character and sincerity of Charles Dickens’ and to accuse Dickens of being ‘more or less of a humbug’ [285].

Here's another ending:

Dickens awoke early on the following day, Wednesday 8 June 1870 in excellent spirits. He talked a little with Georgina [one of his daughters] about his book, and then after breakfast he went straight over to the chalet in order to continue to work on it. He came back for lunch, smoked a cigar in the conservatory and then, unusually for him, returned the chalet where he remained occupied upon the novel which had taken such a hold upon his imagination. The last pages were written with relative ease, marked by fewer emendations than usual … He wrote the last words to The Mystery of Edwin Drood, ‘and then falls to with an appetite’; after which he formed the short spiral which generally marked the end of a chapter. He came back to the house an hour before dinner and seemed “tired, silent, abstracted”.

While waiting for his meal he went into the library and wrote two letters. One to [his friend] Charles Kent, in which he arranged to see him in London the following day: “If I can’t be – why, then I shan’t be.” The other to a clergyman to whom, in response to some criticism [that he had quoted the Bible irreverently in ch. 10 of ED: ‘like the highly popular lamb who has so long and unresistingly been led to the slaughter’] he declared that “I have always striven in my writings to express veneration for the life and lessons of Our Saviour…”.

Georgina was the only member of the family with him, and just as they sat down together for dinner, she noticed a change both in his colour and his expression. She asked him if he were ill, and he replied “Yes, very ill. I have been very ill for the last hour.” Then he experienced some kind of fit against which he tried to struggle – he paused for a moment and then began to talk very quickly and indistinctly, at some point mentioning Forster. She rose from the chair, alarmed, and told him to ‘come and lie down.”

“Yes,’ he said. “On the ground.”

But as she helped him he slid from her arms and fell heavily to the floor. He was now unconscious. He died the following day without regaining consciousness. [Ackroyd, Dickens, 1077]

Doubling: ‘As in some cases of drunkenness, and in others of animal magnetism, there are two states of consciousness which never clash, but each of which pursues its separate course as though tit were continuous instead of broken (thus if I hide my watch when I am drunk I must be drunk again before I can remember where) …’ [ch. 3]

Mesmerism: Jasper’s look ‘is always concentrated’; in his mesmeric intensity of communication all the power of his body is focused in his eyes: ‘the steadiness of face and figure becomes so marvellous that his breathing seems to have stopped’; when he plays accompaniment to Rosa’s singing ‘he followed her lips most attentively, with his eyes as well as his hands,’ producing strange music of subliminal sounds that become unbearable to the girl, for as Jasper stared he ‘ever and again hinted the one note, as though it were a low whisper from himself…’ So powerful is this transmission of influence through the eyes that ‘all at once the singer broke into a burst of tears, and shrieked out, with her hands over her eyes: “I can’t bear this! I am frightened! Take me away!” [ch. 7]. Except when he is under the influence of opium, nothing blocks Jasper’s view. Rosa laments that ‘he has made a slave of me with his looks. He has forced me to understand him without his saying a word; and he has forced me to keep silence without uttering a threat. When I play, he never moves his eyes from my hands. When I sing he never moves his eyes from my lips. There is no escape from this mesmeric power: ‘ “he himself is in the sounds … I avoid his eyes but he forces me to see them without looking at them”’ [ch. 7]’ [Fred Kaplan, Dickens and Mesmerism. The Hidden Springs of Fiction, Pinceton University Press 1975), 131-2]

Orientalism and Race: The Landlesses are ‘much alike, both very dark, and very rich of colour; she of almost the gipsy type; something untamed in both of them’. Mr Crisparkle, leading them through the Cathedral close thinks of them ‘as if they were beautiful barbaric captives brought from some wild tropical dominion’ [ch.6]

[Edwin Drood and Neville Landless argue]: ‘Say here, then,’ rejoins the other, rising in a fury … ‘You are a common fellow and a common boaster.’
‘Pooh pooh,’ said Edwin Drood, equally furious, but more collected; ‘how should you know? You may know a black common fellow or a black common boaster, when you see him (and no doubt you have a large acquaintance that way); but you are no judge of white men’
This insulting allusion to his dark skin infuriates Neville to that violent degree that he flings the dregs of his wine at Edwin Drood’ [ch.8]

Death and the Gothic Mode: Peter Ackroyd thinks Edwin Drood is 'the closest Dickens came to Gothic'. One of the key themes of the novel is certainly the co-presence of the living and the dead:

‘Old Time heaved a mouldy sigh from tomb and arch and vault; and gloomy shadows began to deepen in corners; and damps began to rise from green patches of stone; and jewels, cast upon the pavement of the nave from stained glass by the declining sun began to perish … in the Cathedral, all became grey, murky and sepulchral, and the cracked monotonous mutter went on like a dying voice, until the organ and the choir burst forth and drowned it in a sea of music’ [ch, 9]

Ask the first hundred citizens of Cloisterham, met at random in the streets at noon, if they believed in Ghosts, they would tell you no; but put them to choose at night between these eerie Precincts and the thoroughfare of shops, and you would find that ninety-nine declared for the longer round and the more frequented way. The cause of this is not to be found in any local superstition that attaches to the Precincts – albeit a mysterious lady, with a child in her arms and a rope dangling from her neck, has been seen flitting about by sundry witnesses as intangible as herself – but is to be sought in the innate shrinking of dust with the breath of life in it from dust out of which the breath of life has passed … ‘If the dead do, under any circumstances, become visible to the living …’ [ch, 12]

Ackroyd argues: ‘the mingling of the living and the dead is at the centre of nineteenth-century Gothic but of course it had also been at the centre of Dickens’s own imagination; the opening of David Copperfield, with the infant David’s fear of his father rising from the graves’ (1054) … and we might add the opening of Great Expectations too, with Magwitch leaping up from amongst the gravestones.

A Reading of Hyungji Park by Kieran Hutchings

“Going to wake up Egypt”: Exhibiting Empire in “Edwin Drood”
Victorian Literature and Culture, Vol. 30, No. 2 (2002), pp. 529-550

For Hyungji Park the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 is a crucial, monumental moment in Egyptian history, it is also in her eyes a significant contextual factor affecting Dickens’ composition of Edwin Drood. At the centre of Park’s argument is the notion that Dickens’ structure and intended resolution for the novel is predicated implicitly upon a relationship to Empire, specifically Britain’s ever increasing influence over Egypt.

Park argues that there is theatricality within Edwin Drood which is not as prevalent within other Dickensian works and that this theatricality leads to a ‘greater than usual Dickensian stereotyping’ with regards to his characters. Whilst this may in fact be an overstatement it is nonetheless interesting that Park links this theatricality to an ever increasing Victorian fascination with Egypt and its significance within nineteenth century popular culture. Park sees a link between Dickens’ ‘pantomime conventions’ and the Victorian commodification of Egypt in that they are both significant parts of Victorian popular culture, their fascination with Egypt permeating all facets of life. It is this popular culture which Park believes in turn has permeated Edwin Drood and implicitly links the plot of the novel to Empire and to Egypt.

For Park however, notions of Empire and Egypt are exhibited in relationship to the domestic sphere, more specifically in relationship to the institution of marriage. Park views the resolution of Rosa’s marriage as central to the outcome of the plot and it is the ‘candidates’ suitability or likelihood for marriage which Park states is inexorably linked with their association to Empire. She identifies Jasper, Neville, Tartar and Edwin as the four most likely candidates for Rosa’s hand in marriage. However she is quick to dismiss the first two due to the negative connotations their associations with empire harbour; Jasper for his opium addiction and Neville for his ‘Mixture of Oriental blood.’ Tartar is also dismissed as a candidate for marriage, despite his role in the navy, due to his belonging to ‘that leisured wealthy class which Dickens criticises for its idleness’. This process of elimination leaves only Edwin is the remaining candidate for marriage. Park then embarks upon a close reading of the role-playing scene between Rosa and Edwin which she utilises as evidence for her theory as to the ending of the novel.

Park highlights in this particular scene each characters contradictory attitude towards Empire and to the East, they ‘subscribe to a separation of spheres in Victorian expectations about Empire: engineering for him, sweets for her.’ It is Edwin’s desire to go become an engineer in Egypt which Park takes as a possible explanation for his disappearance suggesting that he is to return at the end of the novel having undergone some form of bildungsroman or maturation process in the mode of earlier Dickensian figures such as Allan Woodcourt or Walter Gay. It is Edwin’s desire for self-actualisation in the colonies and Dickens’ affinity for such a work ethic which Park takes as further evidence for her ending of the novel stating that ‘It is the middle-class Edwin Drood who faces a working career in the colonies, who deserves the greatest attention as Rosa’s possible husband.’

Central to this argument is Park’s belief that Dickens partly based Edwin’s character upon two significant figures of the day, made famous by their associations with Egypt, Giovanni Battista Belzoni a feted archaeologist working for the British museum and the chief architect of the Suez Canal Ferdinand de Lesseps. Each one displaying the ability for self-actualisation Dickens himself exhibited and revered so much and which Park believes Dickens intended for Edwin’s bildungsroman they ‘serve as examples for Edwin’s going “engineering into the East”’ . What these two figures represent is the link between Victorian popular culture, Empire and Edwin Drood which Park believes is crucial to the composition of the novel and her thesis as to its possible ending. Rosa’s allusion to Belzoni providing us with a tangible contextual factor with which we may read into the novel.

However, whilst Park raises many interesting points her argument is far from flawless, for instance many of Park’s statements such as ‘Many of Edwin Drood’s characters are ready stock caricatures who resemble players in a puppet show or pantomime’ are rather presumptive given that the novel, however short it is intended to be, is incomplete. Furthermore this initial link between pantomime and Empire, however interesting the discussion it leads into, is a tenuous one and seems to be largely based upon an interpretation of a twentieth century theatrical production. Also, there does appear to be some slight antagonism between Park’s reading of Edwin Drood as being filled with one dimensional characters, and her theory as to Dickens’ intention for Edwin’s story arc to be one of bildungsroman, such seemingly divergent readings do not sit well together within the same essay. Nonetheless I find Park’s argument for Edwin Drood’s possible ending highly compelling, entirely plausible and certainly in keeping with what Dickens has written before. I especially enjoyed her close reading of the role-playing scene between Edwin and Rosa and thought that her pinpointing of Belzoni and Lesseps as contextual influences upon Dickens illuminating and insightful. Overall I would thoroughly recommend this essay as despite its flaws, it is a genuinely thought provoking piece.

Lottie Niemiec, 'Who Killed Edwin Drood?'

Whodunnit? Not Jasper.

As a result of Dickens’ untimely demise almost exactly in the middle of writing The Mystery of Edwin Drood, the disappearance of Edwin Drood will remain forever, indeed, a mystery. From the nineteenth century, speculation has suggested, and with ample enough evidence, that John Jasper murdered his nephew in order to secure a future for himself and Rosa Bud, Drood’s wife-to-be. Critics and readers alike have suggested that Jasper’s curious reaction upon learning of Rosa and Drood’s separation indicates that he realised the murder was unnecessary. Further evidence supports the theory that indeed it was Jasper that, presumably, murdered Drood. His monomaniacal obsession with Rosa, his unrealistic and disturbing professed love for his nephew, set within a landscape of opium addiction and double selves would appear to be clinching proof for Jasper’s violently criminal psyche. However, surely we cannot accept such a reductive explanation from one of Britain’s most prolific authors? To release the answer only halfway through creation, indeed implying the answer from the very beginning - is it plausible that Jasper, the violent, obsessive, devilish, obvious maniac could be the answer to all our questions? Surely not.

I shall suggest an alternative theory, one that takes into consideration some of the great themes of Dickens’ work: doppelgangers, childhood bitterness, twisted psyches and, ultimately, extreme plot twists. Into the relatively quiet cathedral town of Cloisterham arrive two outsiders, Helena and Neville Landless. Children orphaned while young and, we learn, brutally treated as they were growing up, resulted in a meek, feminine, yet quietly independent Helena and a passionate, violently driven Neville; twins that seem almost to read each other’s thoughts, and yet so different in temperament from each other. Doubtless many critics have suggested Neville was the murderer - another obvious choice - but I shall suggest instead that his sister is not only the more capable, but also the more rationally plausible.

Overshadowed by a brother that speaks for her, one that admits to having to ‘suppress a deadly and bitter hatred’ that has made him ‘secret and revengeful’, is it not possible that Helena herself could suppress a similar emotion? Neville continues to say:

‘In a last word of reference to my sister, sir (we are twin children), you ought to know, to her honour, that nothing in our misery ever subdued her, though it often cowed me. When we ray away from it (we ran away four times in six years, to be soon brought back and cruelly punished), the flight was always of her planning and leading. Each time she dressed as a boy, and showed the daring of a man. I take it we were seven years old when we first decamped; but I remember, when I lost the pocketknife with which she was to have cut her hair short, how desperately she tried to tear it out, or bite it off.’

Interestingly, Neville reiterates the fact that they are twins, even though Crisparkle is aware of the fact; it impresses upon us once more that they are connected not only through blood and, Neville claims, mentally, but also visibly. For such a quiet woman, it is surprising that she has a strong, animalistic urge to tear and bite at her hair when she feels trapped in her female form. This indicates the strong anger of a hysterical woman, a ferocity that neither Neville or Jasper show or are capable of. She is the one to instigate running away every time, showing a highly independent and masculine streak, one that is prepared to put into action what she desires, as opposed to a brother that, curiously, follows her. If she succeeded in cutting her hair short, she would physically look no different from her brother, making them, as it were, true doubles. Helena may be the real, dark side of Neville’s psyche, even while appearances remain to the contrary. Just as there are two Flintwich’s in Little Dorrit, strikingly similar men in A Tale of Two Cities, doubling and mistaken identity in Our Mutual Friend and even double narratives in Bleak House; so in Edwin Drood does this recurring theme appear.

Helena, a repressed version of her brother, stands very much as the Hyde to a Jekyll, a monster to a Frankenstein: outwardly so demure, yet inwardly burning with rage and repressed anger. Moving from Our Mutual Friend, in which Dickens depicts Bradley Headstone as the archetype of repression boiling over into murderous violence, pathologically insane as a result of his obsession with Lizzie Hexam (although this can be deeply questioned), Dickens’ gives us now the opposite: a woman seemingly innocent, but the other, darker half of her passionate
brother.

The question of motive remains, which again is revealed when the novel’s other themes are taken into consideration, themes such as colonialism, the outsider and marriage. When Helena arrives in Cloisterham she is confronted with a pretty, white female whose engagement to a nice, white gentleman seems all too cosy. Already disturbed from a childhood of brutality, the hatred with which she might perceive Rosa’s relatively easy life, planned out for her stage by stage, would be intense. Helena’s ‘sunburnt’ skin labels her the other, and what vengeance would be greater than ridding a woman of happiness while feigning to befriend her? Once the deed is done, she could quite easily escape to London - which, surprisingly enough, she does. An overshadowing brother would be suspected of the murder because he fits the stereotype perfectly; there is every piece of evidence against him that one could need to convince a jury of his guilt. It is all too convenient. Helena would not only have passed on her inherent unhappiness to another woman, but she would herself be free to live life as she pleased, not having to follow her brother everywhere and perform through him. Additionally, she may have murdered Drood from anger, since by offending Neville, he offends her through him.

Since Bleak House, Dickens’ had set about depicting females as anything from innocent and self-sacrificing to naïve and money grabbing - but not murderers. Lizzie Hexam is the very picture of virtue; Bella Wilfur may be mercenary, but she eventually becomes the perfect Victorian angel in the house. Not since Hortense had Dickens used a woman to paint a bloody, violent picture. This fulfills Dickens’ last great theme - that of the shocking plot twist, the unexpected overthrowing of what we have been lead to believe. With six installments still to be written and published, any reader at the time would have lost interest if Jasper had indeed been the murderer, having figured out the plot far ahead of time.

Futhermore, and finally, The Mystery of Edwin Drood is fast-paced, violent, sexual and drug infested, much like the Sensation novels at the time. Much desired, these novels sold extremely well, and Dickens’ good friend Wilkie Collins could arguably be the first author to augment the Sensation novel as following on from the Gothic with his novel The Woman in White. In this, a woman that is beautiful from behind turns out to be ugly from the front – ‘The woman was ugly!’ - highly controversial at the time, while another has been driven mad by an evil seducer. In Lady Audley’s Secret, a woman turns out to be the murderer (although in the end, not) of a man by pushing him down a well. In The Moonstone a woman commits suicide by letting quicksand suck her down (reminding us of the quicklime in Edwin Drood that would have quickly devoured a body), and in East Lynne a woman commits adultery, leaving her children and husband for a wicked murderer. From this we can clearly see that what was selling well were the frightening, yet popular, stories of female hysteria, of strange, uncanny events and murderers. In this ‘Madwoman in the Attic’ climate, it is very possible that in leading us to believe Jasper killed Edwin Drood, we have been entirely led away from the fact that Helena is more capable of cold-blooded murder.

OMF II

For the second class on Our Mutual Friend I'd like to talk about the river, and about sexuality. On this latter, I'd point you towards Eve Sedgwick's famous book Between Men: English literature and male homosocial desire (Columbia University Press, 1985). Her category 'homosocial' to describe intense, eroticised but not necessarily fully sexual male-male relations is useful, and her reading of OMF is famous. Google books has some of this text available online -- though sadly not the specific Our Mutual Friend chapter! But see what she has to say about Edwin Drood, and other nineteenth-century texts, and see how persuaded you are. (You'll find reviews of Sedgwick's book here, and here.

J Hillis Miller's chapter on the novel in his older but still useful Charles Dickens: the World of His Novels (1958), 279ff., is very good too.

Our Mutual Friend

This coming Monday for the first of our two Our Mutual Friend sessions, and there are a couple of contexts I'd like to discuss in class. In the first instance it would be interesting to see whether we think 'the dustheaps' (or waste more generally) functions as effectively as a governing metaphor in this novel, the way 'prisons' did in Dorrit, and 'the law' (or 'fog and mud') did in Bleak House.

There are a number of good readings of waste in OMF: Nancy Aycock Metz's 'The Artistic Reclamation of Waste in Our Mutual Friend' (Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 34:1 (1979), 59-72) for one. Following the swampy path, Howard W. Fulweiler's essay '"A Dismal Swamp": Darwin, Design, and Evolution in Our Mutual Friend' (Nineteenth-Century Literature, 49:1 (1994), 50-74) argues for the novel as a distinctively post-Darwinian text:

Abstract: Our Mutual Friend, published just six years after Darwin's The Origin of Species (1859), is structured on a Darwinian pattern. As its title hints, the novel is an account of the mutual-though hidden-relations of its characters, a fictional world of individuals seeking their own advantage, a "dismal swamp" of "crawling, creeping, fluttering, and buzzing creatures." The relationship between the two works is quite direct in light of the large number of reviews on science, evolution, and The Origin from 1859 through the early 1860s in Dicken's magazine, All the Year Round. Given the laissez-faire origin of the Origin, Dicken's use of it in a book directed against laissez-faire economics is ironic. Important Darwinian themes in the novel are predation, mutual relationships, chance, and, especially, inheritance, a central issue in both Victorian fiction and in The Origin of Species. The novel asks whether predatory self-seeking or generosity should be the desired inheritance for human beings. The victory of generosity is symbolized by a dying child's "willing" his inheritance of a toy Noah's Ark, "all the Creation," to another child. Our Mutual Friend is saturated with the motifs of Darwinian biology, therefore, to display their inadequacy. Although Dickens made use of the explanatory powers of natural selection and remained sympathetic to science, the novel transcends and opposes its Darwinian structure in order to project a teleological and designed evolution in the human world toward a moral community of responsible men and women.

Personally I have my doubts; although Darwin's book was a major event in nineteenth-century intellectual and cultural life (and still has the power to shake the world, even today). On the other hand, Daniel P. Scoggin thinks it's all about vampires: 'A Speculative Resurrection: Death, Money, and the Vampiric Economy of Our Mutual Friend', Victorian Literature and Culture, 30:1 (2002), 99-125. Which appeals to me rather more.

Natalie Leeder on Dorrit

In ‘Little Dorrit’s London: Babylon Revisited’, Nancy Aycok Metz argues that Little Dorrit acts as a response to the changing shape of London in the mid-nineteenth century. Whilst she acknowledges that such an interest in the transitory nature of the metropolis is nothing new in Dickens’ work, she maintains that in Little Dorrit he visits the theme with a deeper critical eye and seriousness.

Aycok Metz suggest that the novel engages with contemporary archaeological discourses which were brought to the public eye; in 1951 Household Words told ‘The Story of Giovanni Belzoni’, and that same year Austen Henry Layard returned to England. The images of ruined civilizations touched the romantic imagination, and there was a vogue of landscape images of London as a ruin. Aycok Metz emphasises the depiction of the ruined city in Little Dorrit, which she argues ‘sometimes reads like a museum guide to “lost” London’.

In this it differs from the immediacy of the descriptions in Dickens’ other novels; Little Dorrit plays with distance. Aycok Metz uses Mrs Clennam’s house as an example of the temporal confusion of the novel, as architecture serves to remind us of the past: it is an ‘anomaly’ among the changing metropolis as it clings to a long gone stability.

Aycok Metz argues that this distance is particularly relevant from a readerly perspective; removed by time, we are forced away from any sense of integration. We must share the detached consciousness of the characters as they ‘camp out on the ruins of the past’. Clennam walks down empty streets, reminiscent of a lost civilization, which parallels the depopulation of the city (whilst the slums continued to grow). This contrasts to Dickens’ usual portrayal of the crowds of London, and such journeys as Oliver, Snagsby and Florence take through the metropolis.

Another historical influence Aycok Metz draws attention to is the improvements in London from 1847-54, such as the railways, a new sewer system and slum clearance. The visible ruin and upheaval is reflected in the ruins of Little Dorrit. The Italian episodes in the novel serve to further this image, as they provide a reminder of the fate of Rome, hinting at London’s own destiny.

Aycok Metz argues that Clennam attempts to confront the past that is ever present in his surroundings, but struggles with its fragmented and empty nature: ‘discontinuity rules’. His experience of it as such is reflected in the more minor characters such as Flora. They are forced to return to the past. To conclude, Aycok Metz draws upon Dickens’s own experience of return as he revisits the prison ‘so closely associated with his own early and intense pain’.

Ultimately, Aycok Metz’s reading of Little Dorrit is an interesting insight into Dickens’ world and its discourses. However, it seems to fall short of any deep analysis of the novel. There is little in the essay that could be disputed as such, but it never seems to go far enough to truly penetrate Little Dorrit’s London.

New term: Dorrit

You'll probably have already heard that teaching has been cancelled for tomorrow (Monday 11th January) on account of the inclement weather. We'll start with Little Dorrit next week (18th) instead, and roll the course through to reading week.

What I'd mostly like to talk about, in that session, is prisons, and the consistently worked-through thematic of imprisonment in the novel. This is a mainstream critical perspective on the novel that takes its cue from an essay written half a century ago by the American critic Lionel Trilling. Trilling was commissioned to write the introduction to the Oxford Illustrated Dickens ed of Dorrit; the essay was later reprinted in The Kenyon Review Vol. 15, No. 4 (Autumn, 1953), pp. 577-590 (click that link and you’ll find the whole essay):

The subject of Little Dorrit is borne in upon us by the informing symbol, or emblem, of the book, which is the prison. The story opens in a prison in Marseilles. It goes on to the Marshalsea, which in effect it never leaves. The second of the two parts of the novel begins in what we are urged to think of as a sort of prison, the monastery of the Great St Bernard. The Circumlocution Office is the prison of the creative mind of England. Mr Merdle is shown habitually holding himself by the wrist, taking himself into custody, and in scores of ways the theme of incarceration is carried out, persons and classes being imprisoned by their notions of predestined fate or of religious duty, or by their occupations, their life-schemes, their ideas of themselves, their very habits of language.

Symbolic or emblematic devices are used by Dickens to one degree or another in several of the novels of his late period, but nowehere to such good effect as in Little Dorrit. The fog of Bleak House, the dustheap and the river of Our Mutual Friend are very striking, but they scarcely equal the force of the prison image which dominates Little Dorrit. This is because the prison is an actuality before it is ever a symbol; its connection with the will is real, it is the practical instrument for the negation of man’s will which the will of society has contrived.

Trilling later added a footnote: ‘Since writing this I have had to revise my idea of the actuality of the symbols of Our Mutual Friend. Professor Johnson’s biography of Dickens taught me much about the nature of dustheaps, including their monetary value, which was very large … I never quite believed that Dickens was telling the literal truth about this. From Professor Dodd’s The Age of Paradox I have learned to what an extent the Thames was visible the sewer of London, of how pressing was the problem of sewage in the city as Dickens knew it, of how present to the mind was the sensible and even the tangible evidence that the problem was not being solved. The moral disgust of the book is thus seen to be quite adequately comprehended by the symbols which are used to represent it.’ [AR]

Sarah Weaver on Copperfield

Sarah Weaver: A critical response to 'In Search of Beein’: Nom/Non du Père in David Copperfield’ (Virginia Carmichael).

'In Search of Beein’: Nom/Non du Père in David Copperfield' furthers a traditional psychoanalytical reading of David Copperfield by considering ’David’s development in terms of his desire to experience and express the Imaginary in a Symbolic Order of differential value.’

Carmichael’s essay argues that David’s marital relationships seek firstly the image of his Mother, and later the comfort of a Mother. As well as this, many of David’s other relationships are created with those who represent a father-figure in some way. Indeed, she begins by addressing David’s ‘old unhappy loss’ of mother which leads to ‘partial identification with surrogate father and mother figures and alter egos.’ We immediately identify the image of Dora’s bouncing curls with that of his Mother, Clara. Dora becomes an escape for David, she is a way of returning to the past and from resisting self-development. This is evident in David‘s confession that ‘the more I pitied myself, or pitied others, the more I sought for consolation in the image of Dora.’

Dora then is just that, an image of what used to be, and what never was; an indulgence in the imagination. Dickens’s protagonist reflects on ‘what an idle time it was! what an unsubstantial, idle time.’ On the other hand, Carmichael identifies Agnes as the comforting image of the mother. Indeed, Agnes is David’s calming influence, she is, as Dickens so often reiterates, David’s ‘good angel.’ However, although David seeks comfort in ‘the remembrance of her clear clean eyes and gentle face came stealing over me, it shed a peaceful influence on me…,’ his relationship suffers a different loss in that it is desexualised.

Virginia Carmichael points to the many broken relationships in the novel, and the triangulations which complicate straightforward relationships. She draws on the likes of Steerforth and Heep who, in their dark doubling of David, complicate his sense of self. Another example that Carmichael draws upon is that of Miss Murdstone, yet another warped motherly interference who recurs in the novel- initially as a third party between David and Clara, and later between David and Dora. Here too Dickens draws together, and morphs the wife with the image of the mother An alter ego that the article does not make much of is that of Uriah Heep who embodies the sexual desire for Agnes which David lacks. Dianne F Sadoff notes the way in which ‘Uriah Heep also appears as a dark figure for David’s desire for success and self creation.’ Indeed, David cannot escape Uriah’s presence, he exclaims the the way in which ‘he knew me better than I knew myself.’ In a way, it necessary for David to quash any sexual feeling for Agnes in order to free himself from the grasp of Uriah Heep. In a similar way, Carmichael notes how David has to reject Steerforth in order to progress towards becoming a writer. Whilst Steerforth’s name appears to offer guidance, it becomes clear that David must take a different route in order to become both socially productive and happy. David’s drunken slurring to his friend, declaring ‘Steerforth-you’retheguidingstarofmyexist ence,’ is reminiscent of another warped guiding star: Estella in Great Expectations. In this novel, the protagonist never frees himself from the influence of his misguided star whereas David must reject this route of the alter-self and instead seek a motherly guidance in Agnes, ‘pointing upwards.’

Carmichael concludes that ‘the imaginary and the triangulated structures of the narrative, as well as the transcendental language, betray this ending tone of resolution, showing David still firmly imprisoned in the realm of the imaginary.’ I would suggest that, whilst with Agnes , David is able to become a productive being in the eyes of society, he has not free of his psychological loss. Indeed, the novel portrays the need to be both willing and able. Whilst Berkis is willin’, he is not able to continue in the novel, as is the case with Dora. This leads the reader to the somewhat melancholy conclusion that David does not replace the loss of his childhood, but that he follows his Aunt Betsey’s advice to ‘act the play out.’

Lauren Broderick on Alex Zwerdling’s Esther Summerson Rehabilitated.

Alex Zwerdling begins his text Esther Summerson Rehabilitated by describing the common misconceptions surrounding Esther before he commences his defence of her. He believes that these criticisms are misunderstandings and so the reader must rid their comprehension of Esther of any clichés before they can be aware of her role in Dickens’ Bleak House.

The abuse Esther experiences as a child indicates a progression in how Dickens’ represents this from a physically abused Oliver Twist to an emotionally abused Esther Summerson. She is denied of any love which she consequently hungers for, so whenever she receives compliments she writes them all down and cherishes them as love even if she doesn’t believe them. In this way her constant denials of her own worth may not be false modesty but instead proof that any sense of self worth has been bullied out of Esther. This is a wound which will never heal in her and which spurs Esther on in her adult life. Her desire for love is so strong that she never clearly specifies what kind it is she strives for. Hence, her engagement to Jarndyce suggests her confusion between parental and romantic love. Furthermore, she is constantly a spectator in other people’s romances, such as Richard and Ada. This cements the idea that she is unsuitable for romantic love, something which her illegitimacy later seems confirms to her as she accepts she will never be loved in a romantic way but instead in a communal way by society. At the beginning of the novel she is treated like an old woman and so is clearly not looking for romantic love. Therefore, Jarndyce becomes the idyllic match in this situation. In addition, in her meeting with Woodcourt Esther’s style becomes flustered which depicts her anxiety at feeling a romantic attraction as opposed to a paternal or friendly love as she is used to. Esther’s love of Ada is a displaced form of romantic love. This may be a result of Esther’s view of Ada as girl she may have been if she’d not been born different. This theory is complemented in the text when Esther refuses to see Ada when she is ill as she believes: “I will die”. Her concern for Ada is so strong that if she became ill it would destroy Esther; this also validates the connection between them as the death of Ada would be the death of a possible Esther. Likewise, it is only after Richard has died and Ada is free to love her guardian again that Esther is able to marry Woodcourt. As both girls are two sides of a single nature it is impossible for them to both be engaged in romantic love at the same time and so this switch is necessary for the novels progression. In addition, Lady Dedlock is also a part of Esther. Her haughtiness and isolated opposes Esther’s immersion into the community as well as he cheerfulness. They are both also searching for something, Esther as a child and Lady Dedlock as a mother. Moreover, Lady Dedlock has given up her lover and married a man who she respects but does not love, a fate which Esther narrowly escapes. Indeed, her learning of the disgrace of her birth corresponds to her falling ill and so leads to her resolution that she too must give up the idea of romantic love and accept that she will have to live with communal love and be happy with it. Thus, she retreats into her safe world in Bleak House. Her marriage to Jarndyce would mean she would remain in this haven forever and the idea of this panics Esther meaning that her marriage to Woodcourt at the novels conclusion had rescued her from her resolve to be happy with communal love and to lock herself in Jarndyce’s Bleak House forever.

Rebecca on the Scrooge Problem

Rebecca Lilly on: Elliot L. Gilbert: 'The Ceremony of Innocence: Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol'

Gilbert’s essay 'The Ceremony of Innocence: Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol' addresses ‘the Scrooge problem’, that is, the critical tradition of questioning the sincerity of Scrooge’s sudden transformation from being mean-spirited to kind-hearted. Gilbert begins by listing the critics who have contributed to the debate. Edmund Wilson for example, first doubted the authenticity of Scrooge’s character change in his essay ‘The Two Scrooges’, in which, he argues that if we were to follow Scrooge beyond the frame of the story, he would: ‘unquestionably relapse into moroseness… [and]… vindictiveness. He would, that is to say, reveal himself as the victim of a manic-depressive cycle, and a very uncomfortable person’. Wilson’s attack on Scrooge is supported by Humphry House, in Dickens’s World, and by Edgar Johnston writing in Charles Dickens His Tragedy and Triumph, who both declare that Scrooge’s new identity is adopted too quickly to be psychologically convincing. However, Joseph Gold, author of Charles Dickens: Radical Moralist, contradicts all three when he suggests that by penning a fairy or ghost story, Dickens ‘deliberately avoids dealing with the question of spiritual growth’; thus removing the need to find Scrooge’s personality change believable.

Gilbert’s own view of the ‘Scrooge problem’ is mixed. He is quick to refute Gold’s theory when he argues that simply associating Scrooge with the world of fairy stories is too simplistic, as it does not account for the realism Dickens shows when representing his other characters. But examples to illustrate this are notably absent, and reflect Gilbert’s inability to fully disassociate A Christmas Carol from the world of make believe. He is however decisive in his rejection of Wilson’s view, that Scrooge’s reformation is wholly unbelievable and only temporary, when he proposes that there is sufficient emotional intensity generated by the three Christmas spirits to make Scrooge’s transformation genuine. But, he also admits that his support for Scrooge’s change of heart is not free from doubt, as similarly to House and Johnston, he feels that the ease of Scrooge’s alteration is questionable. Furthermore, to accept the overnight metamorphosis of a man who has spent a lifetime bullying clerks, revelling in misanthropy and grinding the faces of the poor, is ‘to deny all that life teaches in favour of sentimental wishful thinking.’

But, despite confessing to having his own reservations over the haste of Scrooge’s reform, Gilbert suggests that such uncertainty can be diluted when placed in the context of the author’s writing style. For he believes that as an author, Dickens is much more interested in what characters ‘are’ than in what they are ‘in the process of becoming’, and much more devoted to the vivid presentation of characters already accomplished selves, than analysing their developing nature. He also argues that Dickens should not be judged by the traditional standards of plausibility as he is primarily a metaphysical novelist. However, yet again he fails to give detailed examples of where such a broad statement can be applied to other novels by Dickens. He does however explain why he views A Christmas Carol to be metaphysical; it is because it portrays the journey of a human being trying to rediscover his own childhood innocence. Such innocence Gilbert claims is evident in Scrooge’s encounter with the ghost of Christmas past, when Dickens’s has Scrooge’s fiancé break off their engagement, because the man she sees before her is not the man she first knew. Here, he reveals that Scrooge was not always bitter and mercenary, and therefore not so different from the man we are shown at the end of the novel. Thus, Scrooge’s new self is believable as it is in part his old self.

To summarise, Gilbert’s essay provides a new hypotheses to explain the reader’s misgivings regarding the plausibility of Scrooge’s radical conversion; he is merely returning to his childhood innocence. While this is convincing, the fact that Gilbert fails to clarify at the end of his essay whether his reading has silenced his own doubts about Scrooge is significant. Clearly, the ‘Scrooge problem’ is not fully resolved. Moreover, Gilbert’s attempt to bypass the issue with his suggestion that Dickens is exempt from having to adhere to the normal rules of character realism, because he is a metaphysical novelist, is a weak defence. Protesting that the novel does not have to conform to conventional realism is exactly the same argument proposed by Joseph Gold, and criticised by Gilbert. The only difference is that while Gold argues for immunity on the ground of supernatural content, Gilbert argues for exemption of the grounds of the author’s style. Rather than looking for reasons to excuse the question of credibility in Dickens’s depiction of Scrooge, Gilbert’s essay would have gained more weight if he had examined why as a society we struggle to accept that that selflessness can triumph over self interest, or that a sick child can win the compassion of a villain.

Christmas Carol

Gearing up for the last class of term: here are some perspectives on Dickens' Christmas Carol for you. We've already mentioned in class what Elliot L. Gilbert (in his essay 'The Ceremony of Innocence: Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol', PMLA, 90:1 (Jan., 1975), 22-31) calls 'the Scrooge problem':

Edmund Wilson stated that problem succinctly and dramatically in his well-known essay “The Two Scrooges”: ‘Shall we ask what Scrooge would actually be like if we were to follow him beyond the frame of the story? Unquestionably he would relapse, when the merriment was over—if not while it was still going on—into moroseness, vindictiveness, suspicion. He would, that is to say, reveal himself as the victim of a manic-depressive cycle, and a very uncomfortable person’ [Wilson] … there is a discontent in even the most positive emotional response of the serious reader to this book. It is a discontent arising from the obvious disparity between the way in which moral and psychological mechanisms operate in the story and the way in which they seem to the reader to work in the ‘real world’.

Gilbert says some interesting things about this 'disparity'. Also worth your time is Audrey Jaffe's 'Spectacular Sympathy: Visuality and Ideology in Dickens's A Christmas Carol' [PMLA, 109:2 (Mar, 1994), 254-265], which has interesting things to say about the visual dimension of the text; and Ruth Glancy's slightly wider-ranging 'Dickens and Christmas: His Framed-Tale Themes' [Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 35:1 (Jun, 1980), 53-72].

I also asked you to go see the Zemeckis film version, in part because I want to talk about the cultural currency of the text. I went to see it myself (and blogged my reaction); namely, that although I was a little put-off by the advanced publicity, in the end I was pleasantly surprised by the film itself.

Dickens and Illustration

Today's session is on Dickens and his illustrators, and more broadly on the place of illustration in the book culture of the nineteenth-century. The artist with whom Dickens is most closely associated, of course, is Hablot Browne, or Phiz: Victorian Web host the whole of Michael Steig's excellent 1971 monograph Dickens and Phiz. Check that out.

John Ruskin's thoughts on Wood Engraving are interested (there are several online editions of the Ariadne Florentina; here's one). J Hillis Miller's book on Illustration is interesting, too.

Carly Jones on Household Words

A response to Shu-Fang Lai’s article, ‘Fact or Fancy: What Can We Learn about Dickens from his Periodicals "Household Words" and "All the Year Round"?’

The foundation of Shu-Fang Lai’s article derives from a comment that one of Dickens’ friends made about the periodicals, claiming that Dickens put “himself, his thoughts, feelings and inspirations into each column.” In his article, Shu-Fang Lai questions the accuracy of this comment and after claiming that Dickens’ complete supervision over the periodical “defies common sense,” he underlines Dickens’ reliance in his sub-editor, William Henry Wills. Lai looks at primary sources in the form of letters to highlight the communication occurring between the sub-editor and Dickens whilst he was away with his family or busy with amateur theatricals. These letter confirm that Dickens wasn’t always able to oversee his periodicals before they were published as Will asserts that when the periodical, “has had the benefit of your revision, the touches you have given to it have improved it to a degree that seems to me marvellous.”

Shu Fag Lai continues to assert that Wills had a huge input in the content of Household Words and uses Lehmann’s (a member of staff from the satirical periodical Punch,) declaration that Wills was Dickens’ “alter ego” and Dickens himself even referred to Will as his “other self.” After discussing Wills’ input concerning content, Lai turns to describe the importance of style in Household Words along with the importance that the periodical’s demographic included the working class. Lai interestingly underlines that Dickens couldn’t get all his contributors to write in the way that he wished them to, that is without pretention, Latin and complicated language. An anonymous article, “Dr. Browns ‘Fallen Leaves’” is given as an example of someone who only makes one contribution to Household Words, presumably as his contribution fallen did not fit what Dickens’ wanted.

On a positive note, Lai’s article provides premises for an individual’s more in depth research on the editors input to the periodicals. It would also be interesting to research how closely the topics and style used in the articles, written by Dickens and other contributors, influence the serialised stories. One prime example is Dickens’s article ‘On Strike’ (published 11 February 1854) which seemingly influenced the content of Elizabeth Gaskell’s serialized novel, North and South. It seems in this article that her fictional strike at Milton is based on the real strike at Preston that Dickens discusses in his ‘On Strike’ article. Lai’s title asks, ‘what can we learn from Dickens?’ It however, seems to me that Lai should assert in his title that his article is concerned with Dickens’ position as editor of Household Words and not Dickens as a person.

Ellena's response to Judith Wilt

Ellena Johnstone, A response to: ‘Confusion and Consciousness in Dickens’s Esther’ by Judith Wilt

In her article Judith Wilt explores Esther’s narrative alongside its first-person counterparts in David Copperfield and Great Expectations. Given the usual negativity towards Dickens’s representations of women, Wilt is refreshingly positive about his attempt. She feels that ‘Dickens’ Esther Summerson shows him a new kind of horizon’ which ensured he was ‘committed to the wider anxieties of the Self-Other relationship, which are the female’s lot in the world.’ It might have been interesting to hear a little more about these ‘wider anxieties’ and how this new perspective influenced his depiction of women in the novel, but Wilt moves on a little too swiftly and, if a criticism can be brought against her, it is that she makes a great quantity of intriguing points but does not afford enough time to explore each fully. She does, however, make some interesting and original points. Particularly noteworthy is her observation that Esther’s narrative task is very different to that of David and Pip. She even controversially suggests Dickens’ rendering of Esther surpasses his male first person narratives in terms of credibility, writing that:

‘Since her purpose is the full telling of a story larger than herself and her own past, to an audience wider than herself and her own present or future, her feats of memory, her insights into to other minds, her happy presence at the crucial scenes of so many other lives are more credible than David’s or Pip’s.’

Another key point in her essay concerned Esther’s modesty and how criticism has found it tiresome and pretentious; she quotes John Forster calling her narrative technique a ‘too conscious unconsciousness.’ Wilt believes Esther is uncomfortable about crediting her own virtues as a result of her upbringing and the insistence of her Aunt that she is nothing and worthless. This theme of nothingness and blankness pervades the novel, and Wilt cites Lady Deadlock’s constant boredom as a consequence of ‘a catastrophic personal blankness’ in her life brought about by the absence of her lover and child.

It was also fascinating to hear her take on of the idea that Esther’s marriage to Woodcourt is a reward for her loyalty to her Guardian, which some members of the seminar found troubling. She claims that it is ‘confused loyalty’ that moves Esther to accept her Guardian’s proposal in the first place, and that Esther realises, even cherishes the fact that, she will be entering into a sexless marriage. The latter point is, however much it rings true of the novel, mere speculation as nowhere in the text does Dickens’ actually suggest that the marriage will be confined to a platonic level, but it is interesting to think about none-the-less.

Essentially, Wilt makes some engaging points in her article but the reader would perhaps get more out of the essay if she selected a few key ideas and developed them more thoroughly. It is a minor point though; the article is on the whole accessible, well-written, original and definitely worth reading.

Household Words: reading for 23rd Nov class

As you'll see from the course booklet, next monday's session is on Household Words. What I'd like you to do is start with the very first issue of Dickens's magazine, available in its entirety on Google Books, here. (Indeed, Google Books have the entire run of HW; so if you start and want to carry on ... for instance, if you want to discover what happens in Lizzie Leigh, the serialised story with which Dickens kicked off, you can just carry on reading).

So, to reiterate: please read the first issue of Household Words in its entirety by next week's class.

Dickens's personal contributions to Household Words have been collected and annotated by Michael Slater ("Gone Astray" and Other Papers from "Household Words," 1851-59; reviewed here by Lillian Naylor. And, here's Shu-Fang Lai’s 'Fact or Fancy: What Can We Learn about Dickens from His Periodicals "Household Words" and "All the Year Round"?'

Here's a review article by K. J. Fielding on a reprint of the complete run of Household Words' (1850-1859), that says a couple of interesting things.

There are some book-length studes, too. Sabine Clemm's Dickens, Journalism, and Nationhood: Mapping the World in Household Words (Taylor & Francis, 2008) is partly available through Google Books; as is John Drew's Dickens the Journalist (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).

Women and Dickens

A few links for Monday's session: we are talking about the representation of women in Bleak House, and the representation of Esther in particular, as a way of trying to articulate a more cogent approach to the question of women in Dickens' fiction ... more cogent than just saying 'he doesn't do women very well, does he.'

The key text, even after all this time, is Michael Slater's Dickens and Women (Stanford Univ. Press 1983): chunks of which are available on Google Books. Definitely worth checking out.

There are many good articles on Esther herself. Here are a few:

Alex Zwerdling 'Esther Summerson Rehabilitated', PMLA (88:3/May, 1973), pp. 429-439. The splendidly named Zwerdling was one of the first to challenge the reading of Esther as a 'sentimental, insipid character' arguing instead for the psychological acuity of Dickens's comprehension of the effects of repression and isolation of the development of her consciousness: 'she is ... the unconscious spokesman of the many characters in Bleak House who have never known parental love [which] makes her tale the most important illustration of one of the novel's major concerns-the breakdown of the parent-child relationship.'

Judith Wilt, 'Confusion and Consciousness in Dickens's Esther', Nineteenth-Century Fiction (32:3/Dec 1977), 285-309. One of the best readings of the Esther's charactarisation and voice I have read; particularly good on Self/Other representations.

Timothy Peltason, 'Esther's Will', ELH (59:3 Autumn, 1992), 671-691. Interesting, although a little dense: reading of the novel via discourses of 'will'.

Eleanor Salotto, 'Esther Summerson's Secrets: Dickens's Bleak House of Representation' Victorian Literature and Culture, (25: 2/1997), 333-349. Salotto reads Esther's narrative voice not, as many critics do, as a straightforward articulation of 'angel-in-the-house' Victorian feminine ideology, but rather as a 'duplicitous' reappropriation of masculine idioms. Not sure how convinced I am, but it's an interesting read.

Paul May on Copperfield and Happiness

Paul May, ‘A response to Annette R. Federico 'David Copperfield and the Pursuit of Happiness' [Victorian Studies, Vol. 46, No. 1 (Autumn, 2003), pp. 69-95].

The premise for Federico’s essay stems from Dickens’ angst at his inability to feel contented, certainly whilst writing David Copperfield, and possibly for the duration of his life, as evidenced in John Forster’s The Life of Charles Dickens. ‘Where is happiness to be found then’, Dickens writes, ‘Is this my experience?’ Federico accordingly views the text as symptomatic of Dickens’ obsession with ‘his own frenetic pursuit of happiness’, as a result of being unable to reconcile his personal experiences of delight with both his prolific success as an author, and his eminent fame. This leads her to see the text as an indictment to follow David’s experiences in the world as Dickens’ own ‘intimate study’ of ‘the conscious desire for happiness in one’s life, and the right to pursue it’. In this manner, Federico seeks to assess one of the core principles which define David Copperfield as a Bildungsroman; as the hero, it is David’s burden to achieve happiness, ‘a task that is neither confirmed by David’s apparent success, nor denied by his repression and self-negation’, and is ineffably intertwined with Dickens’ own existential state.
To Federico, an assessment of David’s desire for ‘perfect happiness’ is worthless without a consideration of the cultural perception of happiness in the nineteenth century, and its apparent influence on David’s ideals. She therefore decides to devote much of the essay to exploring Victorian cultural and philosophical texts which ‘point to the seriousness with which [they] addressed the moral implications of the pursuit of happiness’, with reference to the notion that any prospect of ‘happiness’ is convoluted by utilitarian and utopian theory, in addition to Victorian consumerism and individualism. Her choice of theorists (most frequently Carlyle, Mill and Sidgwick) is careful in that it their contentions are often in direct response to one another, and allows her to assemble them into a dialectic argument. This attempt to synthesise does not, however, prevent Federico’s critical tone implicitly conveying her preference towards the progressive, considered views of Mill (as well as simply devoting more of the text to him), despite her accrediting Carlyle as having ‘the prophetic voice of the Victorian sage’. Concisely, she surmises that the utilitarian ‘doctrine’ for acquiring happiness was doomed to be flawed by its preoccupation with happiness itself, which vanquishes any prospect of its fruition, as demonstrated by Carlyle’s suggestion that ‘we should cease babbling about “happiness,” and leave it resting on its own basis, as it used to do!’. She proceeds to remonstrate Carlyle’s stoic declarations with Mill, who sought to ‘claim happiness for philosophy and rational analysis’ in a manifestly Socratic way, but criticises him for ‘[seeming] not to have considered what happiness might actually feel like until his own personal crisis compelled him to ask himself what would make him happy’. She surmises from this comparison, that the clear divide between utilitarian thinking, ie. ‘the greatest happiness principle’, and Carlyle’s condemning position on ‘a philosophy that guarantees an individual the right to pursue his or her own happiness implicitly endorses the abdication of duty, labor, and the pursuit of justice’ were both fundamentally inconducive to both equitable and selfish happiness. She finds Mill and Carlyle to be especially unable to reconcile this conflict, as utilitarian morality is fundamentally at odds with industrial capitalism, with it being implausible to ‘be realised in anything other than a utopia’, and concludes solely with the purpose of proving that the question ‘Am I happy?’ is certainly ‘one of the clearest imperatives of the age’.
Armed with this understanding, Federico asserts that David ‘must both ask and answer’ these essential questions of individualist happiness in David Copperfield. The novel certainly asks these questions, as she is unquestionably correct in finding this to be key in the novel’s premise, and the Autobiographical Fragment certainly confirms this. But it certainly does not seek to truly answer them to any ascertainable degree; David certainly cannot be assumed to be ‘perfectly happy’ at the end of the novel. After marrying Agnes, he discloses: ‘And now, as I close my task, subduing my desire to linger longer, these faces fade away’, and Federico doesn’t fail to notice this tone of ‘regret and self-suppression’. After all, were Dickens’ himself endowed with the answers while writing David Copperfield, he surely wouldn’t have written to John Forster with such musings as ‘I seem to be sending some part of myself into the Shadowy World’.
The essay is perhaps at its most incisive when questioning whether Dickens suggests that happiness can be attained by the Carlyean assumption that ‘there is no such this as such fulfilment on this earth’ outside of ‘steady, plain, hard-working qualities’ (David Copperfield, p. 512). Federico assesses whether any of the characters truly find fulfilment with this notion: whether Mrs. Gummidge appears to be truly satisfied when she is useful, and if Steerforth’s inability to be ‘contented’ stems from his lack of productivity. This prospective ‘answer’ to individual fulfilment is clearly left unresolved by Dickens; despite David’s growing success as a writer, Federico finds this inconclusive, as he so seldom details ‘the rewards he receives from it’. The fine line between unhappiness and happiness seems to ‘have a deeper source for Dickens than in productive labor’, she surmises. While acknowledging the possibility that Dickens is suggesting that the joy of work cannot compete with ‘the desire for lasting passion and transcendent, enduring love’, is this assumption not futile when considering David’s relationship with Dora? David claims to have been initially vested in a ‘headlong passion’, but it is not long before he suffers ‘unhappiness and remorse’ (p. 689), and is forced, as Federico rightly admits, to take a lesson in ‘prudence and good sense’.
Annette Federico’s essay provides a fantastically expansive and multifaceted analysis of the various streams of philosophical doctrines devoted to the ‘pursuit of happiness’ abundant in the nineteenth century, and closely assesses their influential value on David Copperfield, despite becoming increasingly unable to surmise that Dickens’ rendering of this struggle truly colludes with any of them. She clearly wishes to avoid a biographical study (erstwhile briefly hinting at the ‘valuable’ work done by other critics), yet what it is that she ascertains that Dickens is conveying, regarding the most equitable approach to pursuing happiness, seems to depend mostly on her own intuitive (and mostly biographical) analysis of David’s meditations on happiness in the text. Oddly, she is forced to conclude rather banally by merely praising Dickens’ selection of ‘happiness’ as a moral theme, and praising the manner in which in the novel enforces ‘the liberal reader’s involvement in the hero’s quest for happiness’ – a seemingly unsatisfying conclusion to an essay so impeccably precise in its theoretical assessment of nineteenth century philosophical criticism.

Bleak House 1

Today's session is on mud and fog. Some of it will be riffing off Steven Connor's reading of the novel, 'Deconstructing Dickens: Bleak House', in his excellent Blackwell's 'Rereading Literature' volume Charles Dickens (Blackwell 1985). You might want to check that out.

Lottie Niemiec's response to Schaumberger

Lottie Niemiec, 'Partners in Pathology: David, Dora and Steerforth' - Nancy E Schaumberger

Schaumberger writes an intriguing psychoanalytic analysis of these three characters, the main points of which are, to paraphrase, that Steerforth is the way he is because he was loved by his mother only for his achievements and that she, essentially, lives through him. She claims that Dora grows up as a pseudo-wife to her father, while yet remaining a child, she therefore cannot overcome her ideas of being a child-wife, thus in her adult life she remains very immature. David is only able to become an adult and the ‘hero of [his] own life’ because both Dora and Steerforth die, leaving him with more mature companions such as Agnes and Traddles. She claims further that Dora and Steerforth are ‘prisoners of childhood’ - unable to move successfully into adult life. While her argument at its most basic is appealing - her analysis of Steerforth is primarily a sympathetic one - one can take her claims much further to suggest that David can connect (albeit inadequately) with Dora and Steerforth because they act as extensions of himself. If one is to take this view, then Mr Murdstone becomes almost a nurturing influence, rather than a tyrannical usurper. If Mr Murdstone had not married his mother, David could have remained a child, like Dora, under the loving protection of his immature mother, or he could have become as roguish as Steerforth, resulting from a childish hero-worship, if Mr Murdstone had not removed him from school and sent him to work. Only once this heroic figure from childhood is dead can David become his own hero. David’s marriage to Dora at such a young age is a way of entering adult life too soon, when neither party was ready for it, and they are punished for this by Dora’s inadequacy and early death. Yet by the time she dies, David has realised his mistakes, grown, and become a working, responsible adult. At the moment that Betsey Trotwood comes to London penniess and must rely on her nephew to take care of her, the roles are reversed. David has become the protector, she the protected, and David embraces this role whole-heartedly by writing to earn a living.

Schaumberger claims that Dora and Steerforth were David’s two mistaken friendships, yet I would have to disagree. David learns from Steerforth that one cannot always have what one wants, and if take what you want selfishly, the consequences are painful for others. From Dora he learns the importance of adult responsibility and the pain, yet almost welcome release, of death. Dora’s death allows him to finally realise his love for Agnes; it allows Dickens to use his great theme of rebirth - for David at least - as he is released from a disastrous marriage and allowed to love again. Here Schaumberger agrees, stating that only when Dora and Steerforth die is David free to ‘embark on the final growth spurt of self-realization that leads to his happy second marriage and increasingly successful writing career.’

Although not clearly stipulated, Schaumberger hints that Steerforth is David’s alter-ego, his doppelganger. If this is so, then Steerforth’s elopement with Emily can be seen as David’s repressed desire to do the same. Furthermore, both David and Steerforth grew up with females that love them: Agnes and Rosa Dartle. Rosa’s scar is significant: not only is there an underlying sexual suggestion (Steerforth throwing a hammer at her and splitting her lip, rendering her unattractive to other men for the rest of her life), it suggests the danger of turning your back on freely given love; that anger is destructive and leaves emotional - and physical - scars. When Steerforth dies, the events are set in motion for David to have the opportunity of seizing the love that was denied Steerforth. David does not turn his back on Agnes a second time.

Dora herself receives redemption through recognition that she should not have been the woman David married, that Agnes would be infinitely better for him. Therefore she can be seen also to be a part of David’s subconscious, as she understands what David cannot until he has reflected for many months abroad.
Dora and Steerforth are violently opposed in character. Dora is essentially warm-hearted, honest but weak, Steerforth cold-hearted, false, yet physically strong. Dora lost a mother, Steerforth a father; David both. Dora does not have a feminine influence in her life, a woman to encourage her to be self-sufficient and strong. Steerforth does not have a masculine influence, one to dissuade him from his roguish tendencies - indeed, he is violently overshadowed by females - his mother and Rosa Dartle. David himself has no mother or father, but he seems to acquire these figures during the course of his life. In Mr Murdstone he finds a violent, hard-hearted father; in Peggotty a gentle, caring mother. Later Mr Micawber stands as a father incapable of making the right financial choices, but a father nonetheless that stands by his family and teaches David how to sell and make deals.

Betsey Trotwood is the most nurturing of his pseudo-parents, she is quick, morally upright, extremely caring and guides David always in the right direction. But it is in the sister figure of Agnes (his ‘Angel’) that he finds enduring love.
Schaumberger’s analysis is therefore thought-provoking, but it does not touch deeply on her rather weak suggestions. Her theories may be correct, but her writing style suggests she is reticent about stating her conclusions too forcefully.

Dickens and Fairy Tales

Some interesting things, I thought, came out of yesterday's seminar; and I've blogged a few of them at The Valve. Check it out. [AR]